Our heavily meat-centered culture is at the very heart of our waste of the earth's productivity.

For me hope isn't wishful thinking or blind faith about the future. It's a stance toward life - one of curiosity and humility.

My children threw me a life line: "Return to your roots - food - and rewrite your first book, Diet for a Small Planet." I learned that if I could just show up, in this case, if I could just get myself out of bed, get to the computer in my tiny office at MIT, and start writing, help would start arriving.

What gave her [Diane Wilson] the courage? If you look at someone like Diane, it's easy to say, well I could never be like that. But we don't know. We do know that it's possible for a woman, who didn't grow up as a world changer, to find it in herself to take a stand.

I think that fear of embarrassment is the essence of the human challenge.

I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am."

Despite a tenfold increase in the use of pesticides between 1947 and 1974 (in the US), crop losses due to pests have...remained at an estimated 33%. Losses due to insects alone have nearly doubled, ...from 7% in the 1942-1951 period to about 13% in 1974.